By Greg Mumm

Argentina are a bit like the daggy dad of international rugby. At times, their hairdo’s, tracksuits and beautiful and lasting reverence for the social side of the game seems straight from the late 70’s.

If you have been lucky enough to travel to Argentina with rugby, they still talk of the ‘third-half’ and up until as recently as five years ago were prohibiting clubs at senior domestic level from playing any athlete that had accepted money to play.

Their game today still has an air of a hot night out in Barcelona – slow and sleepy to start, and just when you think it’s time to go home the show starts and you are carried on a frenetic journey that takes you well past party extra time and you get home long after the sun rises not knowing quite how you survived.

This love of life and excitement flows in to their rugby and whilst they may not be the best defensive team in the competition, they have scored the 3^rd most tries in this World Cup and leave their pool with more points accrued than the All Blacks. Specifically, they play there attacking rugby like they are indeed still in the amateur days, as if no one has told them that defence now wins games.

When Eddie Jones took over the Wallabies he often used a statistic about  average passes per attacking play, arguing that one pass rugby whilst safe, was too predictable and boring to challenge modern defences. Within this he often spoke of needing to get an attack from an average of between 1.3 & 1.5 passes per attack to above 2. The exciting and exhilarating part about the Argentinian attack is that already in this tournament we have seen 7 & 8 pass plays from them.

Now, some may say that this is because of weaker defences, slower line speeds etc in their pool, but their attacking mindset has been set long before this tournament and witnessed continuously since their break-out 2007 campaign. In that event they used an at times frustrating kicking game to disrupt defences, hoping that the 50/50 contestable kick strategy would give them a chance at attacking ball against a scrambled defence, and it worked.

However, the confidence of that tournament and the huge amounts of experience their players have gained through international club exposure as well as integration into the Rugby Championship, has given them the courage to run at even the most stoic defensive lines.

The reason this works so well is as follows;

1. Defence is built around certainty, certainty that the guy next to you is on the same page, and certainty that you have the attacking threat under control. Much of this involves making early decisions and communicating well so that all defenders know who has the ball and who has the player either side of the ball. This is why one pass rugby is easy to defend, because there is only 1 decision to be made and communicated.
2. When the attack makes two, three or even four passes during an attacking play, the defence has to make the same number of decisions. Each of those decisions has to be communicated and passed down the line and much like Chinese whispers, the longer the line, the greater the chance of error.
3. This is heightened by a modern defence that is focused on dominating the contact. This requires huge momentum to be generated in to the impact, and often a second defender. This intent creates both physical and mental inertia that can’t react to changes in the attack.
4. Done once or twice, players can scramble and cover the mistakes, but done wave after wave of blue and white attack, defences start to hesitate, sit on their heals and stop talking as they wait and watch to see what unfolds…but by then it is too late and you have been hypnotised by the Tango of the Argentine attack.

The result is a defence spun back in time, and you can almost see the hair-do’s lengthening, the jersey’s loosening and crowd gathering around the boundaries to run on to the field after the final whistle.

It is not an easy feat against defences such as the Irish and possibly the Australians, who hit hard in the tackle and punish mistakes. This philosophy relies on a high skill level executed under pressure and Argentina’s ability to pull this off against the bigger teams has been inconsistent.

Another minor problem is that their defence could at times be referred to as amateur as well, one recent example close to home was the effort to stop Old Spaghetti Arms – Dean Mumm (Or the Camel as they called him at Exeter) – down the sideline in Mendoza.

But in a world where the pursuit or professionalism has taken the beauty and spontaneity out of some of the many wonderful things, I hope with all my heart that the music starts playing on the weekend and the Argies get the chance to take the Irish for a dance and attack their way in to a semi-final showdown against Australia.

So grab your gourd cup and straw, brew some mate tea or if you haven’t been to sleep, grab some Fernet, and get ready to sit on the edge of your seat because anything could happen.